The First Casualty
by isis uf
Summary: She wouldn't have pictured it like this, if she'd pictured anything at all ahead of time. But she hadn't. Darcy's not an agent and this is one eventuality she's never planned for.


**The First Casualty**

Rating - T

******Tags - Darcy & Natasha, Darcy/Clint, Darcy, Clint, Natasha, trope bingo, cliches, first time, willful misinterpretation of the prompt, and I'm not even a little sorry, violence, deaths of minor characters, heavy themes**

* * *

Her hands are shaking. Her hands are shaking and the air smells like hot metal and ozone and something putrid she can't quite identify because she can't think about it right now. And that's the truth. She _can't_ think about it right now. In fact, she can't so much think. Nothing beyond _OhmyGod OhmyGod OhmyGod,_ anyhow.

"Clint get your ass to research lab four," Natasha is saying sharply as she does some insanely acrobatic kick that puts her heel into the last attacker's jugular before _somehow_ connecting with his temple and knocking him out cold without breaking a sweat.

Natasha's badass.

There are five bodies on the ground. Bodies? People? One of the two. A mix of the two maybe. At least one is just a body. He's got a hole in the middle of his chest and an ever-expanding pool of blood beneath him that looks like it might grow to drown her.

"Darcy?" Natasha says gently, like she's approaching an untamed mare that might spook at any second. "Give me the gun. It's over. Just hand me the gun."

Darcy looks at her hand and… oh, there is a gun in it. It's surprisingly light and she can't quite remember how it got there. She wants to will her fingers to loosen but they're clenched so tightly around the metal that it feels like maybe she's fused to the thing. Like she's RoboDarcy now or something.

The body with the hole in it still has his eyes open. They're unfixed and dull. That's weird, she thinks. It's not usually like that in the movies.

"Darcy…" Natasha says again and Darcy realizes she's ever-so-quietly closed the gap between them. "I'm going to put my hand over yours now, okay?"

Darcy nods. At least she thinks she does. She means to. And Natasha's hand carefully settles over her own. Her grip slackens immediately, relinquishing the pistol to Natasha's practiced hands.

"There's blood on my shoes," Darcy says ridiculously as the red tide hits the toes of her Payless discount boots.

There's blood everywhere, but her eyes keep going back to that ever-expanding pool seeping out of the body in front of her.

"You can buy new ones," Natasha tells her. "I'm pretty sure you've earned hazard pay after this."

Darcy laughs at that, short and dark and it makes her sick to think she's laughing. How can she be _laughing _right now?

"I think I'm gonna puke," Darcy says with no small amount of surprise in her voice.

"I won't tell if you do," Nat promises and Darcy loves the super spy a little more for saying so, but manages to push back the urge to be sick.

"What the hell did I do?" She wonders aloud.

"What you had to. You defended yourself. And me," Natasha tells her, eyes boring into Darcy as she speaks, watchful and calculating. "You didn't have a choice. You'll question that later. You'll go over this in your head from every angle. Things will change. He'll be faster or slower. You'll aim worse or you'll hesitate. But I was here and I saw it and you need to hear me when I tell you that you didn't have a choice."

"It's not like the shooting range," Darcy says, unable to keep her eyes from drifting back to the body near her feet.

"No," Natasha agrees. "It's not."

The body, the man she killed, he's maybe thirty. Not so much older than her. He's got a scar on the side of his nose and yellow teeth that speak of too much tobacco and a tattoo on his hand that looks like it was done by an amateur. His skin is weather-beaten and sun-damaged and he looks like he had a hard life. One she ended. But before that… before that…

"I killed someone's son," Darcy says in almost a whisper, the nausea which had somewhat abated coming back.

"You did," Natasha agrees again, because if Darcy can't acknowledge what she's done then there's no way she'll get through it.

"Did you feel this way? Your first time?" Darcy asks, unsure of what she hopes the answer will be.

"I didn't feel anything my first time," Natasha says after a beat. "I wasn't _me_ then. I was Red Room, not a person. A person feels."

Clint barrels through the door a moment later, arrow notched and bow strung tight which is ridiculous in a space as confined as the lab, but that's Clint for you. It only takes him a couple of seconds to figure out precisely what's happened and when he does the bow lowers and he lets a heavy breath out through thinned lips as he shares a weighty look with Natasha.

"Rest of the labs secure?" Nat asks and Clint nods in response.

His hand settles softly on Darcy's shoulder and she tenses and jumps at his touch. Not her usual reaction by any means.

"You're okay, Darce," he tells her as she reluctantly lets him pull her into a hug.

Clint is warm and comforting and familiar and right now she doesn't feel like she deserves any of those things but she'll take them because she's weak and she doesn't have the energy to pull away. Not now.

"Why aren't I crying?" She wonders into Clint's chest. "I should be crying."

"That'll come later," Natasha says with certainty that sounds like a promise.

"Everybody's different," Clint tells her, running a hand through her hair over and over again.

"I hate him," Darcy says quietly. "I hate him for making me a killer and I hate me for killing him. I want to punch him and tell him I'm sorry all at once."

"He tried to kill you and blow up the lab," Clint says levelly. "I'm pretty sure that you having any inclination to _apologize_ to him makes you a better person than he was."

"Does it get easier?" Darcy asks, looking to Natasha.

"You aren't an agent, Darce," Clint says, still stroking her hair like he's soothing a child instead of his girlfriend. "Chances are you'll never have to do this again."

"But if I do," she insists. "If I do, does it get easier?"

It's not Clint she's asking. The Black Widow watches her a second, weighing her answer and Darcy finds she's sitting on pins and needles to hear what it is because Natasha will not lie to her and will not cushion her words for the sake of comfort. It's not her way.

"You should hope that it doesn't," Natasha says finally.

Darcy nods. Maybe she can live with that.


End file.
